Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/288428 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] Health Care Management Science [ISSN:] 1572-9389 [Volume:] 23 [Issue:] 4 [Publisher:] Springer US [Place:] New York, NY [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 649-660
Publisher: 
Springer US, New York, NY
Abstract: 
With hospital budgets remaining tight and healthcare expenditure rising due to demographic change and advances in technology, hospitals continue to face calls to contain costs and allocate their resources more efficiently. In this context, efficiency has emerged as an increasingly important way for hospitals to withstand competitive pressures in the hospital market. Doing so, however, can be challenging given unpredictable fluctuations in demand, a prime example of which are emergencies, i.e. urgent medical cases. The link between medical urgency and hospitals’ efficiency, however, has been neglected in the literature to date. This study therefore aims to investigate the relationship between hospitals’ urgency characteristics and their efficiency. Our analyses are based on 4094 observations from 1428 hospitals throughout Germany for the years 2015, 2016, and 2017. We calculate an average urgency score for each hospital based on all cases treated in that hospital per year and also investigate the within-hospital dispersion of medical urgency. To analyze the association of these urgency measures with hospitals’ efficiency we use a two-stage double bootstrap data envelopment analysis approach with truncated regression. We find a negative relationship between the urgency score and hospital efficiency. When testing for non-linear effects, the results reveal a u-shaped association, indicating that having either a high or low overall urgency score is beneficial in terms of efficiency. Finally, our results reveal that higher within-hospital urgency dispersion is negatively related to efficiency.
Subjects: 
Urgency
Technical efficiency
Hospitals
Data envelopment analysis
Double-bootstrap
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
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Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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